Like Onions

Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They stink?
Shrek: Yes. No.
Donkey: Oh, they make you cry.
Shrek: No.
Donkey: Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs.
Shrek: No. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.
Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions.

I’m thinking about these lines from the 2001 movie, Shrek, tonight, as I ponder my life right now, and more importantly, who I am in the midst of my life right now. I relate to Shrek, feeling misunderstood, knowing there is more to me than meets the eye. I’m an enneagram 4, after all. But mostly, right now, I’m thinking about onions and layers in relation to grief.

I was deeply relieved when July 30th came and went, and I was past the first year of anniversaries of surgery and loss. The day itself, and the few days leading up to it, were somehow harder than I expected them to be, having pre-processed many of the memories with my therapist using EMDR and other techniques. In fact, I was angry that they were as hard as they were, precisely because I’d pre-gamed it all out and expected to be okay. I wasn’t okay. I spent about three days having crying jags, mild anxiety, and remembering. I took a lot of naps, studied my scar in the mirror, and tried to come up with ways to distract myself that only sometimes worked.

And then I was better, or so I thought.

It turns out that when my 39th birthday arrived, eight days after the surgery anniversary, I would begin to discover that, like ogres and onions, grief has layers. I have found myself, for the past few weeks, caught in a whorl of grief that has caught me completely off guard. It took about a week for me to identify that it was grief, and not the sudden onset of a new depressive episode, because my depression has been so much a part of me that every low feeling scares me into believing that we are starting the cycle of pain again. I was watching a home renovation show when it hit me. I stared at the happy host couple, and their two adorable, precocious children and thought, “That. That is what my life was supposed to look like.”

I never imagined a life where I would be 39, single, and childless. It doesn’t matter that if I stop to consider it, I’m not particularly looking for a life-partner right now, and I’m relatively settled in my independence as a single person. It also doesn’t matter that long before I made the decision to prevent tumor recurrence by having a hysterectomy, I was already coming to the conclusion that perhaps children were not in the cards for me, thanks to my hormonal and mental health challenges. I never imagined this life. Never. I imagined lots of hazy futures for myself, stepping into new things, new dreams, but however hazy those “castles in the sky” as Anne Shirley coined them were, they always contained a hazy spouse, an image of me bearing a child in my body.

When I gathered with friends last July, to mark the forthcoming transition to menopause, I asked my sister-in-law, Laura, if she would read over the beginning of the gathering a “Liturgy for the Death of a Dream” from the lovely book “Every Moment Holy: Volume 1”. It begins with these lines, that ring true now, as I enter this newest layer of grief:

O Christ, in whom the final fulfillment

of all hope is held secure.

I bring to you now the weathered fragments of 

my former dreams, the broken pieces of my expectations,

the rent patches of hopes worn thin, the shards of some

shattered image of life as I once thought it would be.

What I so wanted has not come to pass.

I invested my hopes in desires that  returned only

sorrow and frustration. Those dreams, like glimmering

faerie feasts, could not sustain me,

and in my head I know

that you are sovereign even over this – 

over my tears, my confusion,

and my disappointment.

But still I feel, in this moment, as if I have been abandoned,

as if you do not care that these hopes have collapsed to rubble.

A Liturgy for the Death of a Dream from Every Moment Holy: Volume 1, by Douglas Kaine Mckelvey

I am heartbroken and yet recognize God in the midst of that, healing and opening new places. I’m starting school in a few weeks, taking prerequisites to a masters degree I’ve dreamed of obtaining since I was in the middle of my first undergraduate degree in history, and realizing that I wouldn’t go on to become a teacher. I’m looking forward to new beginnings. I’ve rearranged my house to suit me better, and I’m making plans for things that seemed impossible only six months or a year ago, thanks to my mental health journey and my tumor and surgeries. And yet, my heart aches all encompassingly. I cry in all the wrong places, and I laugh in a few of them too. I texted a friend today that I’m struggling to find my equilibrium as this particular layer of grief has knocked my feet out from under me.

And so this is where I am today, laughing with Shrek, and weeping with liturgy. My grief, it seems, is an onion. It has layers, it stinks, and it makes me cry.